316 - The Modern Leader's Blueprint: Trust and Innovation for Business Success with Jim Bramlett

Welcome to Listening with Leaders. I'm Doug Noll, lawyer turned peacemaker. I teach executive leaders how to listen to emotions rather than words so that they can become the leaders everyone wants to follow. And I teach those same leaders how to be authentically present, available, and connected to their families despite being insanely busy. I have learned that we are 98% emotional and only 2% rational. Learning how to listen to emotions is, in my experience, the foundational skill of life. Stick around to the end of the show and I'll reveal how you can be on our next guest in 15 to 20 minutes. So let's get started.

Jim Bramlett, welcome to Listening with Leaders. You have a long history in logistics and then you left that to be reinvent yourself, and now you're a consultant and author. Welcome to Listening with Leaders.

Doug, I am thrilled to be here. I think you have an awesome story audience and just so happy to be here.

Thanks. Let's start off with your backstory. Tell us a little bit about, tell about yourself and everything you've done in your life.

I grew up in South Central Missouri. A middle-class family, both parents worked, nothing special there. I, I ended up graduating college in Southwest Missouri and I got into the transportation logistics business and I fell in love because I just found it amazing. I could look at a piece of freight and say, gosh, 2 days ago that was in California and 2 days from now it's gonna be in New York and all the workings that have to happen. To get that done, it just was amazing. It, it, it's something different every day, some challenge. And so I, I, I started in what's called the LTL industry, less than truckload. So think pallet size quantities. And I progressed, I, I went through a couple companies, but I got the opportunity to work at the general office of the number one LTL carrier, which happened to be in Kansas City. That's how I got to Kansas City 38 years ago. And for whatever reason, through my career, I've had this knack for creating new products, new services, starting companies. Actually, I've started 8 companies.

Wow.

A few for myself and for companies I work for, maybe a new division or a new offering. And I always loved that. So you can't put me in a factory line. It's gotta be something different. I love that startup experience and the challenges and the creation that goes along with that. And in 1999, right at the peak of the dot-com hysteria, I remember I started a dot-com. Yep. I read it. I still remember. I read an article on the front page of the Wall Street Journal that a 23-year-old MBA started Furniture.com and the venture capitalists were bidding to invest. And I thought to myself, I've been in transportation for 15 years. What does a 23-year-old know about the furniture business? And I, I know all there is to know, I thought at the time in the transportation, thought this would be easy. It was far from easy, but I, they weren't bidding for my dot-com for sure. And, uh, but ultimately I attracted some venture capital in Kansas City only after getting some traction. They weren't biting on just a business plan. They wanted proof. And I was able to do that. And, uh, I started this company. We had some success. And I tell everybody this story. I said, up until that time, I was the visionary. I'd never been a leader like that. My, my leadership experience was largely a class president of 12 students. So it was no experience, but all of a sudden now I have a board of directors who are the investors and I've got all these people I'm responsible for. And I learned a lot of hard lessons and, and, and that lasted for 5 and a half years. We had a, not by design, but we had a customer concentration issue. We had a customer that was over 50% of our business. Uh-oh. Yep. You know where that's going.

I know where that's going.

Yep. And we were saving them a lot of money. We were making a lot of money, but they thought they could go do this themselves. And when we lost it, we couldn't, I couldn't cut the costs fast enough. So we ended up merging with another company and I went on my way. And again, I stayed involved in creating new things and 7 years ago, I decided to start a final mile technology company, and I like to describe it this way. Everybody understands the, the experience they get with Amazon and the, the visibility of your shipments, the data, and it's awesome. But not everybody has their own blue trucks running around every neighborhood. And if you're especially in the large and bulky business, say you are an e-commerce company in fitness equipment or furniture or TVs, appliances, you have to form a network to to get national coverage, you might have to have 20 or 30 different carriers dominated by mom and pops. Great service. What I did was built the technology to connect them all to the shipper so that we could bring back data status updates much like Amazon does. So everybody knew where their shipments were, when they were going to be delivered, and that kind of thing. But I wanted it to be a lifestyle business. I I didn't want to be a broker like I had been in the first business. I just wanted to be a SaaS platform doing that. And ultimately I did bring on some other people and away I went. And then my, my wife retired. She was in pharmaceutical sales. She retired 6 years ago. And ever since that happened, she started poking me, hey, remember all those things we're going to do in our golden years? And I always, I always had this thought that I was never going to retire. But someday I would control my own schedule, have a flexible schedule, and do something I really loved. And ultimately I retired 3 years ago and that lasted for 3 months. I got recruited by Vistage to, to set up another CEO peer group in Kansas City. I didn't know about Vistage. I learned about Vistage and fell in love. And I pursued that. I now run two groups in Kansas City. However, set the clock back a little bit, five years ago, and I'm not a voracious reader by any means, but I got this idea for a book and I self-published my first book on the, what I believe is a formula that companies like Amazon, Netflix, and Uber use to dominate their space. And it's called The Unconventional Thinking of Dominant Companies. And I think there's a formula. They don't advertise it, but, uh, they, they put their customer at the front of their universe. They engineer everything backward. And Jeff Bezos preaches in his leadership principles, we obsess about the customer. And, and I know you're really big into listening, and they listen to their customers. Where so many businesses today, I believe, are formed because of the founder's passion or their expertise, and they don't necessarily listen. Is there a need for what you were about to provide?

Right.

And then a year ago, I published my second book, which is really an extension of the first, but it's now what every company can and should be doing relative to their product. I'm a big believer in product. If you get the product, everything else should and can fall in line. And everything else, meaning people, process, and purpose. So I, I include a little bit of all that in the, the second book. And, uh, I'm very passionate about it. Uh, I think so many companies miss the boat. And I have a chapter in my book called Value Proposition. And in transportation and logistics, especially, It's all about feature proposition. We do this, we have 100 trucks, we service Kansas City, we service California. And I tell everybody, buyers are only mildly interested in what it is you do. They're totally interested in what their needs are, solving a problem. And if you can't convey that, they're gonna move on. That's right.

That's—

they're not listening, right? That, that's how I like to say that.

I, I, I wanted to go back to your SaaS project. It's so interesting because yesterday I, on, on the show, I interviewed the co-founder of a company called DeliverRight. I don't know if you've ever heard of them. They're based, they're based on the East Coast and they built a huge platform for moving large bulky stuff. I said, oh, you're the Amazon of the big stuff. And he said, that's exactly right. Same idea where they hooked up with a network of both long haul and, and short haul last mile people. And you literally have the system set up where it's all tracked online, just like you were describing. I guess people are seeing that need out there.

Absolutely. In the small package world, it's not fragmented. There's UPS, FedEx.

That's right.

Close stuff.

But in the big bulky stuff, highly fragmented.

There's thousands of, of providers out there.

That's right. So it was just really an interesting coincidence. So now you're working with Vistage. For people who don't know what Vistage is, maybe you could take a minute and describe. I've come across Vistage. Describe for us what it is and what you do.

Yeah, sure. The Vistage is the world's leading business leader peer group organization. They operate in 40 countries, 45,000 members, but those members form into smaller peer groups typically somewhere between 12 and 18 leaders who don't compete. And, and we work, we help them work on their business because all too often leaders get stuck in working in their business. So we're much more of a strategic coach, helping them, helping them work together as an advisory board, but also educational. I don't think you ever can learn enough about leadership and how to become a better leader. I, I like to tell people, I said, look, when I went to school, I graduated with a marketing degree, which by the way was pre-internet, so none of it applies today. Uh, but in management, I, I, I don't think they spend enough time on, on what it means to manage people. I believe the best leaders are coaches where you have to inspire others to do their very best. And there's a trick to that. And again, since we talk about listening, most leaders are used to talking 80 to 90% of the time. Do that, go do this, how about this, that, that. As a coach, you listen, you talk about 20% of the time, and it's all about the deep open-ended questions you ask. Because what you're trying to do as a coach is get that other person to make their own decision on what needs to be done, because then they'll go do it and not have any ill feelings. Exactly.

Exactly.

Correct.

It's interesting that you're talking about this because I'm, as we said before we started recording, I'm working on my 5th book, which is all about leadership empathy. And I'm emphasizing the point you just made over and over again, that a leader, it's not command and control. It's motivating people by empathy and creating safe environments and helping people become their best and not telling people what to do. That's the last thing you want. It's coercive. There's, there are the continuum of power and coercive leadership. Autocratic decision-making is the worst kind of decision-making you can make.

Yeah.

And you wanna keep it as least coercive as possible.

We, we work on those kind of skills at, at Vistage. We educate, we get 'em to hone their leadership skills. They bring issues, what challenges they have. Guess what issues they mostly have? People.

That's right. Of course, of course.

And, and so when you get a lot of experience and a lot of different perspectives around the table and somebody says, I'm having a challenge here, likely somebody else in the group will say, ah, I, I've dealt with that before and here's what I would recommend. So I, as a chair, facilitate. I'm not a consultant there. I facilitate because I want them to come up with their own answers because then they'll go do that. So we— and, and again, owners, especially owners, don't have anyone holding them accountable. So they set goals. My job is to help them be accountable to those goals cuz I want them to reach their dreams.

That's great.

That's my goal.

What is it that, what is it now, now that you've been doing this, what is it that gets you really excited about this work?

Oh my gosh. I tell people I spent 42 years, Doug, in transportation logistics and I enjoyed it and I had my frustrating times. I love what I do. I'm a business nerd. I love learning how all these businesses work. I'm a lifelong learner. I love learning, but I don't wake up at 3:00 AM in the morning in a cold sweat making payroll, right? Payroll, right? With some issue, I will empathize with them and we'll walk through it and talk through it. But I love it because it exposes me to things I've never been exposed to before. And it's the human dynamics and what makes a great leader tick, what makes a good business flourish. So again, people, process, purpose, all those things we talk about, and I just really dig it.

What do you think it is about you, Jim, that makes you unique and successful?

Um, I think it's a great question. I think obviously my curiosity and I have a drive to achieve. Okay. I just, and I don't know why. One thing that's a little different about me, I'm a, I'm a banjo player and people say, well, hold on.

I'm a fiddle player. I'm a fiddle player.

Oh, you're kidding. You'll have to get to, you'll have to get to it.

I play Irish and old-timey, a little bluegrass, and I play jazz and blues. There you go.

That's very cool. A lot of people ask me, why the banjo? And I say, because everybody plays the guitar.

That's right.

I want to be a little I want to be a little different. And as Fiddle, I'm sure it's challenging, right?

Oh, yes. There's a challenge there.

I love a challenge and I want to be slightly different. So that's what drives me.

We've been talking about listening. Where did you learn how to listen?

That's a great question. Not early in my career, not middle of my career. I think when I really started paying attention to listening was when I became a Vistage chair. I've been in business. Really? Oh, absolutely. I did not understand the importance of deep listening. And I'll tell you this story. My first business I started, I was a senior in college. Very naive. And I started a business not because there was a need. I didn't listen to the market say, oh, we need this. It was a restaurant and it was in my hometown, but I'm in college 100 miles away. But that's how naive I was. I don't— they'll love it. They'll love it. We're going to go to— as my roommate and myself We're gonna do this. We'll hire a manager and we'll just collect the checks. And, and you know where this story's going.

Oh yes.

So I, I didn't listen. My next company I started was a trucking company. Why? Because I knew the trucking business. Was there a need? Did I listen to the people say, oh boy, we need— no. I knew the trucking business and I said, man, I've seen all these other trucking companies succeed. This will be easy. And you know where that went. So, and that's exactly what I think caused me to write my book was I know, I believe I know what buyers are looking for. Okay. And it's 4 categories, 4 criteria. Most of our buying decisions are very innate. We don't even think about it.

It's emotional.

Okay, we're gonna get—

all buying decisions are emotional.

But we're gonna get gas, we're gonna get coffee, we're gonna buy a lot. We, we don't even really think about it. Now, if it's a large ticket item, we think about it. But there are 4 things I believe we make our buying decision on what we're gonna buy and from whom. One is convenience. I wanna save time. I wanna save effort. I want simple and easy. I don't want anything more complex in my life. If I'm going down the interstate and I need gas, I pull off to the right. I'm not crossing over the other side, even for a penny a gallon. That's 15 cents. I, I'm not doing that. I'm, I saving time and effort. That's very important. Not only the product, but the buying process has to be convenient. I also believe that we buyers are looking for competitive and especially transparent pricing. We wanna know what we're gonna spend before we spend, and no offense, But we don't necessarily like dealing with attorneys because we don't know. That's, we know the hourly rate.

That's why I don't practice law anymore.

Here you go. Airlines. We don't know about that fine print.

That's right.

And transportation is the same way. Third is we want a great experience from everybody we buy from. We want to be treated like we're their only customer, even though we know they've got thousands. Now. It, it's all based on that user experience based on what kind of company it is. But when we are about to buy something, we have a perception of what we're about to buy and we want that fulfilled. It's especially true if there's a brand promise sitting behind that, they better fulfill that brand promise. But if I'm buying food at a drive-through, a McDonald's, I'm not expecting it to be especially tasty, but I want it hot. And oh, by the way, I want my fries included in the combo meal. I don't wanna pull out. If I'm at a fine restaurant, I want ambiance and I want very tasty. I want a very polite waiter who's— these are, these provide a great experience. If it's a, if it's merchandise, I want durability, style, efficiency. That creates a great experience. And finally, the fourth is trust. We wanna trust. That what we're buying is going to be delivered. We like warranties, we like guarantees, we like testimonials. We want to know how long have you been in business, have you won awards? All of those build trust. I know that what I'm going to get is exactly what I expect and what you say. So when you do all 4 of those as a seller, I'm not giving my buyer many excuses not to buy from me, right? However, most companies have a conscious trade-off. And I always use this example. Walmart's a great example. Walmart, they're everyday low prices, roll 'em out to America, but the experience, I hope you like checking yourself out.

That's right.

They're laid out a little different. Some aren't well lit. It's crowded. That experience isn't very good. Nordstrom, I can go get a personal shopper, great merchandise, beautiful, but very pricey. That's their trade-off. So most companies have this spin-off that give buyers an excuse. I'm not gonna buy from you cuz you're expensive. I'm not gonna buy from you cuz I don't like checking myself out. I'm not gonna buy from you. It just takes too much time. It's too much effort. And so the dominant companies try to eliminate those excuses and you have to constantly be working on that formula to improve. And in the news this week. Deepseek.

Yeah.

The new AI LLM.

We'll, there's a lot of, there's a lot of stuff going on around. We'll find out. We'll know.

We will find out. But what'd they do on a price point? And, oh yeah, it blew everybody away and caught everybody by surprise. Now, whether they can deliver the actual product remains to be seen. That's exactly right. But that's why I tell everybody, you've got to constantly be working on your convenience, your price points. You got to be working on improving the user experience and embellishing trust. Always, because that's what competitors will find a weakness and exploit that and come in and you'll be looking at and go, what happened?

There you go.

That, that's how it works.

Great advice. So we're about out of time. I got one more question for you. What's one thing, Jim, about yourself that we'd never know about unless you told us?

That I'm, at heart, I'm an introvert.

Something? Every single successful CEO I've talked to on this show, which has been over 330, were all introverts.

Wow, I did not know that.

We are all introverts. It is amazing to me 'cause I'm an introvert, really introvert. There you go. Thank you so much for your time today, Jim. It's been a real joy talking to you and meeting you.

Mark, thank you.

Doug Noll here. Thank you so much for listening to Listening with Leaders. If you are a successful executive leader who would like to be on this program, please visit podcast.dougnull.com/podcast. If you got something out of this interview, would you please share this episode on social media? Just do a quick screenshot with your phone phone and text it to a friend or post it on the socials. If you know someone that would be a great guest, tag them on the social media to let them know about the show and include the hashtag #ListeningWithLeaders. I love seeing your posts and guest suggestions. We are regularly putting out new episodes and content. To make sure you don't miss any episodes, go ahead and subscribe. Your thumbs up, ratings, and reviews go a long way to help promote the show and mean a lot to me and my team. Wanna know more? Go to my website, DougNoll.com, or follow me on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram. That's @DouglasEnoll. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you on the next show.